Today, Health 2.0 launched Health:Refactored, the first ever code and design focused conference for health! This conference will give developers and designers the tools for making the greatest possible impact in health tech. Health:Refactored is bursting on the scene, May 13 – 14, at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

There’s a revolution afoot: hospitals and patients are looking to solve the biggest problems in health care using the highest level health tech ideation and creation. Health:Refactored is the first conference that helps technologists hone specialized skills, learn the latest health hacks, and design for specifically for health.

Crash courses on the essentials of health tech – Navigating HIPAA, Optimizing for Government Standards, and Demystifying Health Data

Interviews, debates, and general rough-housing with health and tech experts

Talks on how to make the right partnerships, hack the system, and design products that rock

Opportunities to connect with industry experts as well as peer developers and designers

It’s the prime-time to join the health tech revolution; the health IT market is booming, with an expected 24% growth between 2012 and 2014. That’s where Health:Refactored comes in. This conference is designed as a pressure-cooker for health dev mastery, bringing together technologist talent and expert knowledge. Health:Refactored is a way for premier developers and designers to become the preeminent health technologists of tomorrow in this rapidly growing and evolving field.

The holidays are a time for joy and merriment. But during the break, a little too much food and drink, or not enough exercise can really 'weigh' down celebrations. That's why we've made a list of 10 of our favorite holiday health apps, to help you stay healthy, light, and spritely this holiday season.

Meet The Three Most Fund-able Health Companies From The DC To VC Showcase

Today, Morgenthaler Ventures and Health 2.0 concluded its “DC to VC” startup showcase, a nationwide contest that aims to find the most promising and “fund-able” young businesses in health IT looking for funding. From hundreds of applicants, twelve finalists were chosen to pitch their ideas on stage at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco in front of a crowd of 400+ VCs, angel investors and entrepreneurs.

The companies were then categorized according to whether they were seeking seed funding or looking to raise their Series A ($2M to $5M). The seed stage presenters were hand-picked by the event’s accelerator partners — Rock Health, Blueprint Health, Healthbox and Startup Health — teeing up a panel of judges to select the winners from each category. The panel of judges included reps from Morgenthaler, Comcast Ventures, InterWest Partners, Venrock, Qualcomm Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank, to name a few.

After twelve on-stage presentations and some deliberation, the judges selected Beyond Lucid Technologies as the winner of the Series A category, while Aidin took home the Seed Stage prize. Each category also opened voting to the audience (those both at Health 2.0 and watching via the live stream) to select the “People’s Choice” winners. While Aidin won the audience vote for the seed category, CarePlanners captured the Series A hardware.

Because we love to talk about awesome healthtech startups here at TC, you’ll find a deep dive into the winners below. Check it out, and tell us your thoughts in the comment section.

THE WINNERS

A startup out of the Blueprint Health accelerator in NYC, at first glance, it may seem like Aidin is targeting a tiny use case, but first impressions can be misleading. If Aidin is successful, it can have a big impact on our health. Hospitals can be crowded places, which puts a lot of stress on somewhat limited resources.

Although one might imagine that hospitals would want people to hang out as long as possible (racking up those hospital bills), in reality they are eager for people to avoid repeat visits. In the U.S., one in four Medicare patients get readmitted to the hospital within 30 days of leaving — and those re-admissions come with a $17.4 billion price tag for hospitals.

Part of the reason re-admissions are so high is the unreliable quality of the some-25K “post-acute care” facilities in the U.S. — the nursing homes, health agencies and rehab centers that provide care not only for elderly people but anyone recovering from an acute illness, injury or surgery after leaving the hospital.

To help patients find the right care facilities and help hospitals reduce re-admissions, Aidin provides patients and their families with up-to-date ratings and reviews of local providers, along with sharing outcome data from those who have previously visited the particular facility.

Patients can filter the data based on their specific condition or need, meaning that, if you’re looking to rehab after knee surgery, you’ll see ratings for providers that specialize in orthopedic rehab, for example — not head trauma. Basically, on the consumer side of things, Aidin has set out to create a Yelp for continuing care.

On the hospital side, Aidin allows them to integrate their solution into existing infrastructure to allow hospital staff to create referrals, share ratings, etc. Aidin raised $600K in seed funding back in June, and you can read our coverage here — some of which is referenced here.

Founded in 2009, this California-based startup offers an electronic health record (EHR) system on steroids, built for those who arrive first on the scene when there’s an emergency: Fire, EMS and industrial-emergency response teams. The company’s cloud (and client) platform aims to make First Response more efficient and cost-effective for medics, hospitals and patients by providing those who respond to emergencies with digital care records, logistical decision support, real-time data for regional resource planning, GPS and telehealth tools. And the best part for them? There’s no integration engineering required.

Said another way, the startup’s value proposition is that it’s the first integrated, all-in-one solution for EMS providers that connects first responders with hospitals and continuing care facilities. According to Beyond Lucid, this is of critical importance because half of patient data is lost at hand-off (from facility to facility), so it works to solve this problem by eliminating the use of paper used in-transit, allowing virtual data entry, real-time data transfer to hospitals, embedded GPS for use on both sides, etc.

Because of the fractured, every-man-for-himself nature of the industry, hospitals, states and cities all tend to have bloated, incompatible software built specifically for its own use, without much attention paid to the macro picture around it. Sounds like the educational system, right? By providing software that brings each link in the chain together and bringing new, lightweight technology to an industry that survives on 20+ year-old IT systems, Beyond Lucid thinks it can help not only reduce costs but ultimately save lives.

It’s not an easy road to convince an entire industry to jump on board the Data Transparency Train, but it it can (prove it’s possible both systemically and economically), then Beyond Lucid is going to be around for quite awhile.

In 2005, CarePlanners Founder Alan Blaustein was diagnosed with thymic cancer. As he underwent treatment, Alan found that he and his family spent more time dealing with a complex and confusing healthcare system — coordinating physicians, insurance companies, medical billing agencies and hospitals — rather than concentrating on fighting the disease.

So Blaustein and team developed CarePlanners to be a platform that helps patients make better decisions about healthcare, providing a staff of experts and online tools that allow users to coordinate care services, create plans around diagnoses, resolve insurance and billing issues, etc.

The startup, which aims to become the “AAA for Healthcare,” employs consultants with a wide range of expertise, including registered nurses, social workers, medicare experts and healthcare advocates. Collectively, they create a marketplace for healthcare consulting that relies on personalized care from actual people, instead of simply creating a database of healthcare information.

CarePlanners offers a dashboard (called the CareCenter), through which users can organize their health information around their medical needs — and those of their loved ones. Based on the info users provide, the service offers tips, notifications and reminders and allows them to manage their plans and connect directly with consultants. These plans range in cost between $200 and $900.

As it stands today, the startup has a leg up over point-solutions, as it provides support for a variety of issues, with its one major drawback being that its plans are not covered by health insurance. Going forward, CarePlanners will expand the scope of its dashboard to become a place where people can store all of their personal and family health information, like medical records, histories, and so on. It also plans to add to its roster of 25-odd consultants and beef up its user base by partnering with employers.

There’s a lot left to do, but the mission to help channel the firehose and simplify an over-complicated healthcare system is an important one.

The proposed panel includes an outstanding group of speakers including Eric Dishman of Intel, David Van Sickle of Asthmapolis, and DJ Patil of Greylock, and will feature a spirited discussion about how sensor technologies are transforming health as we know it (full description below).

You can help our proposal make it on to the agenda by voting for our proposal directly and by spreading the word to your contacts. Please feel free to tweet/post viaTwitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, your blog, or any other channel you think might be helpful. To vote yourself, please take the following brief steps, which together should take 30 seconds: